About the Festival

As we zoom past Instagram filters, automated editing apps on our phones and countless banal videos on our timeline, we want to relive the magic of analogue film, churning through a projector, evoking its tangible quality. The 16mm Film Festival was conceived with a view of re-connecting with the cinematic medium through it’s celluloid history and present. To foster a growing community.

With year long film engagements at the Harkat Lab, we have been working our way through re-building and supporting an infrastructure for filmmakers and artists who want to work on film. In line with the festival every year, we also facilitate the production of 5 one-minute 16mm films by young filmmakers in India, as part of our  ‘Ek-minute Film Competition’.

The 16mm Film Festival is organised by Harkat, a film lab, alternative arts space and boutique film production company based in Mumbai and Berlin.

16mm Film Festival 2023

Harkat is back with the 16mm Film Festival, a festival exclusively screening works made with celluloid film. This includes all formats of celluloid based work, such as 8mm, 16mm & 35mm, found footage and more. This year also marks 100 years since the introduction of 16mm film, the artist’s format. As an ode to art and film, we remind ourselves of why this medium is our artistic choice. The poetry and politics of it, the energy, craft and chemistry, the nature of it. The labour and slowness it demands, the art and craft of making with it, the discoveries and happy accidents.

This year’s curatorial takes refuge in poetry —

The morning sun erupted with streaks of gold. I peered longingly far and close. Someone said the boat was too small. Many eyes. Intense labour. Calm waters. Rough skies. A silent echo to feed a beating heart. Along with strewn flowers lay a thought, a memory, a poem. All wrapped in rivers of dew. If a song came my way, I sang it. If a picture appeared, I dreamt it. If a stray flower appeared, I picked it up to give it the love I long for. An evening cloud floated in the sky of my dreams. It promised dreams in inky blue. I looked down at the earth and became one with the night. Filling my heart. Mourning the pain. A woman appeared with a camera. She sat by the banks. A sigh, a step, a lyric. An infinite world in a tear on her cheek. An image forms. A dream begins again. I wake.